A few years ago at Stitches, towards the end of the day, a tired friend asked if she could hang her bag on the back of my electric wheelchair. Sure, no skin off my nose; go ahead!

If only there were a video. I was tootling along, and had no idea that between her bag and my chair, somehow the back snagged someone’s rollaboard luggage they were using that day for their purchases. I saw a few people’s surprised expressions, having no idea why, and then all the sudden my 250-lb chair was popping a wheelie! That woman had seen her bag suddenly going airborne, had grabbed for it hard, and I guess you don’t come between a knitter and her new yarn.

So here I was at Stitches again last week, and as I’ve mentioned, my chair was dead. I ran into my old friend Sandi. It was her first time being there as a vendor; she’s one of the co-owners of Purlescense in Sunnyvale. We talked wheelchairs a moment, and she said she’d inherited a scooter she didn’t need and hadn’t been able to find anyone that did need it. My electric chair was dead? Did I want this other one?

This is like asking, do you want some cashmere yarn to go with your stash?

We finally got down to San Jose to pick it up from her. Wow. Thank you, Sandi! I have to tell you, we need to replace a car, and one of the issues holding us back was that we didn’t want a big one anymore, and we couldn’t see buying one where we couldn’t haul that monster chair around. It seemed like we were stuck with my big minivan with the seats out. This scooter, Richard simply lifted it up into the car. It folds. It splits into pieces for transport if need be. He can fit it in the trunk of his ’01 hybrid Prius. We can replace my van with another Prius. The scooter isn’t as fast, it’s certainly not as turbocharged, it puts me very low to the ground–my husband, who is 6’8″ to my 5’5″ wryly commented that that was certainly not a new thing–but for me it does everything I really need. Wow. Thank you, Sandi!!

(Now, I just have to figure out how to put a finger puppet on this thing somewhere somehow.)